Apple’s iCloud locked user out of her own account for 6 months due to a surname code bug

Apple’s iCloud is reportedly found with a flaw that prevented an author from accessing her account as her surname was ‘True’. The author named Rachel True brought this up on Twitter a few days ago, complaining that she was not able to log in to her iCloud account. Based on her tweets, she was not able to access her account for 6 months for an issue that seems to be related to coding.

One of the tweets uploaded by ‘True’ showed a diagnostic screen stating “iCloud has stopped responding,” along with an option to send the diagnostic data to Apple. The details section of the window mentions “cannot set value true’ to property lastName’. This indicates that Cloud is interpreting the last name of “true” as a boolean flag instead of a text string.

True added that she has already been on a call with Apple for hours but is still not able to log in. But interestingly, later her tweets suggested that this was a bug that could also qualify her for the Apple bug bounty reward. Until yesterday (March 6), the issue was not solved. However, Apple is likely to get in touch on Monday or Tuesday for assistance.

Talking about iCloud, Apple recently added a new service that will let you download all of your iCloud Photo Library images and videos and then import them right to Google Photos. The company explains how users can go about doing this, and it is really quite straightforward. You can download your data from the Apple privacy dashboard, choosing the option to ‘transfer a copy of your data’ and Apple will do the rest.

On the other hand, the version of the iCloud Windows app that allowed you to sync passwords from your Apple devices with your Chrome web browser on a Windows PC, was recently pulled up. The changelog on the Windows Store still states that the password syncing functionality is available though, however, if you download it, you’ll still see it is the 11.6 version without the password sync option.